The FrontChannel

News, Updates, and Thoughts from the Team at CASTLEaka stuff worth posting from the backchannel

Our friends at Big Ass Fans have been receiving more and more publicity lately for, well, just being better than everyone else. We have enjoyed not only working with Big Ass Fans on design ideas for the various spaces that CASTLE inhabits but also just watching the growth of their company. A key driver of their growth has been a different kind of culture, one in which they truly value their employees. This culture is reflected in everything they do, including how much they pay their people which this recent CNN Money story profiled.

Photocredit: CNN Money from linked story.

Big Ass Fans are very much the poster child for Kentucky's future. It is techy, it is advanced manufacturing, it is great jobs that pay well, but most important is that Big Ass Fans represent the kind of culturally different approach to our future place in the world. Kentucky is a great place to live, to build things, to innovate ... but it is a working class kind of place. Big Ass Fans builds fans, not semiconductors. We build the Camry here, not the Tesla Model S. We can be the place that builds the things that average people use, just better than it has to be. Kentucky has had a deep and growing relationship with Germany. We have an operational office in Hamburg and our Governor is actually there right now visiting to discuss the potential VW expansion into Kentucky.

Kentucky doesn't need to be Germany but we can learn a lot of lessons from them in how their manufacturing sector has been culturally different. Big Ass Fans seems to have a good handle on that and I hope more Kentucky companies take lessons from them.